Daughter of a Prince
by Yero my hero
Summary: To those of you who were disappointed to see Son of a Witch end so soon, I have made a sequel to the sequel of Wicked. This is the story of Liir's daughter, whom I've taken the initiative to name Lena.
1. Prologue 1

**A/N: **HI! This story is going to be rewritten, and then actually continued if things go as planned.  
To everyone that was reading this before, I apologize. I hope you all still continue to read.  
I'd like to hear pretty much anything that you have to say. About the fic or, you know, otherwise, about how the weather is (it's lousy here) or... well, I'm being facetious. But I do like comments to know what you think. :)

He squatted uneasily at the edge of the firelight, gazing down at the small, soft face of his daughter. He ran his eyes over her small fingernails, the tiny hands that were gently clenched around the blanket that had once been on Candle's bed.

It was inevitable, really, that the girl reminded him so much of Elphaba. It seemed that he and Elphaba had somehow had their roles switched, seemed that now he could understand her, now that it was too late, could understand the birth of a child she hadn't planned and couldn't want, alone in the world and yet expected to raise it, a child that hadn't listened, had frolicked like she never had, had sought others because what she gave him hadn't been enough, had been stupid and one day clambered into the bucket of a well…

He'd haunted her life, and now her memory would haunt his.

He shook his head gently, refocusing his eyes on the little bundle before him. It seemed not to move, not to breathe. His fingers curled about the lip of the basket, rocking it slightly, and the child opened her eyes to look up at him, stretching her toes out to meet the wicker under his fingertips. Her eyes were bright, a swirling gray that reminded him of flying.

"Let's name you, yeah?" he asked. "How does that sound?" The child looked at him as if she knew that nothing had ever sounded so fake to him before, unblinking and still except for swaying slightly with his hand. Her skin reflected the firelight, glistening. There were orange lights in her eyes.

"I'm sorry," he murmured. The room began to suffocate him, and he moved to the window, pulling the cloth down from it and peering out. "I can't kid even myself," he said to the sky. He couldn't imagine how any woman ever did it, any nanny, any father. He couldn't see himself sitting forever on the deserted old farm, housed in by regret, silence, raising another Elphaba, another child that would be hated and would hate the world.

The mauntery was the only place that he could think of to go, the only place that might give him the help that he needed. The child began to cry softly somewhere behind him, and he unconsciously attributed the sound to the familiar noises of Birds, flapping and calling. The sunlight pressed firmly at his eyes. _They won't help you_, the sky said, the flowing grasses whispered, the apples in the breeze nodded in accord. _Look at her. She's green. Everyone will know._

He turned back to the room, back to the child mewing in her basket in the middle of the dirty floor, tiny fists jerking at the air.

He was silent for a moment.

"Come on! Let's take a trip!" He gathered the basket into his arms and paused to survey the room. Sheets were lying across the floor, one from his bed, one near the trash, one that he'd taken down from the window. One on the draining board in the sink and another halfway in a pot on the floor, as though Candle had briefly considered making a stew of the bedding. How had they even gotten so many sheets?

Liir nudged at the floor with his toe and turned to the door, grabbing Elphaba's broom on the way out.

And, with a small amount of certainty to his step, Liir left Apple Press Farm forever. The place seemed to sense his departure, attempting a last moment of redemption, hoping for the dignity it must once have possessed. The sun hung midway in the sky, the grass tickled the bottoms of his calves. The winds danced. The trees waved meekly in farewell.


	2. Prologue 2

**A/N: **The second part of the prologue. Of three. I know, random that there's so much prologue, but it just works that way. After that things get more exciting. :)

Liir paused at the gates of the mauntery, his unnamed child squirming in the basket in his arms. He looked up at the clear, listless blue of the sky, birds chirping mildly on the parapet and the sun warm upon his shoulders.

Despite the beauty of the day and the unfamiliar calm that had settled over Liir (from having made a decision right for once), he felt distantly afraid. Nervous, maybe. Each of his arrivals and departures at the Cloister of Saint Glinda had been cloaked in fear, uncertainty, and he thought again of Elphaba, setting out into the unknown, only the broom and an overweight, undereducated child on her heels.

He looked down at the broom, feeling that he wouldn't carry it with him any longer. That by returning it to the mauntery he'd be returning it to her, acknowledging her death and inviting for himself a life of his own, one away from her, one in which he lived without needing her, without needing her memory or her flight.

The baby squirmed again in the heat, her nakedness wrapped in Candle's thin blanket, and Liir raised the handle of the broom obediently to rap it against the mauntery door. A few of the birds that had been singing so merrily only moments before took off into the sky, skimming away.

The door flew open suddenly and a disheveled maunt nearly tripped into him before she caught herself against the door, which slammed into the stone. A few more birds took flight.

She straightened with difficulty, obviously disoriented and half-asleep, gazing intently at the birds that were soaring off towards the clouds.

Liir quickly decided, with more than his usual amount of rationality in regards to momentary decisions, to take advantage of the drowsiness of the woman before him. He clutched the basket protectively to his chest and strode past her with an air of dignity, striding down the hall to make-believe meetings of the utmost importance.

When he was certain that the maunt must already have returned to her nap in the watchtower, Liir glanced over his shoulder into the now-empty courtyard. He let out a breath that he hadn't realized that he'd been holding in against the thumping of his heart. The faint lullabies of a domingon played in the still air around him.

He stood in the middle of the hallway, the weary child in a fitful half-sleep in his arms, sunlight glancing off the windows into the dusty air and domingon song trailing across the floor. "She thought the baby was dead," he whispered to himself, gripping the basket tighter, as though afraid he might have been wrong all along. "She thought it wouldn't make it." _She reads the present. _He dismissed the thought and clenched his stomach against the nauseous feeling that was forming there.

The quiet sound of footsteps joined the haunting song and the silence as someone came around the corner ahead of him. Liir became aware quite quickly of his idleness, of the fact that he was standing in the middle of the hallway with no time to flee. (So much for his brilliance of a few moments before.)

He resigned any attempt to escape and instead waited, watching the woman approach. The sunlight reflected blue off of her dress and onto her face as she passed through a bar of light from the window, and he could make out a familiar little nose, long eyelashes, soft blue-reflected lips that he knew he'd seen before. "Lady Glinda?" he questioned aloud.

She looked up toward him, seeing him for the first time in the in-between gloom of the courtyard and the hall. A smile slid quickly over her face like a mask.

"Liir!" she beamed, appraising him with a sweeping motion of the eye. "How good it is to see you again!"

He almost wanted to question her statement. Wanted to say "No." Wanted to drop the baby in the middle of the hallway, to disappear, to run. To fly. No response of any real sense seemed like it would do.

"Liir?"

He looked down at her feet, white shoes that reflected her dress. Everything blue.

"Liir, are you alright?"

He nodded his head faintly. His throat itched.

She furrowed her brow at the boy (Was he a boy still, this son of the girl with whom she'd grown up?), who was continuing his staring match with her toes. "Er, what is it that you've got there, Liir?"

He glanced down at the basket, then up at Glinda's face. "Lady Glinda, I…" He paused. No words came. He lowered the basket in his arms instead, neglecting the broom that fell from the crook of his arm to the floor.

Glinda's eyes shot to the sudden clattering of the handle on stone. Elphaba's broom. It was a moment before she looked up again, back to Liir, and then down, down to the child in his arms. She stared, transfixed.

Both were silent. A bird was shouting desperate calls out the window. "Elphie," Glinda breathed, trailing a shaking finger along the green child's soft cheek.

"Oh, Liir," she whispered. "Oh…" She let out a ragged sigh. "Dear."

- - - - -

There was a tentative knock at the door that jerked her from her thoughts. What with the incessant screeching of the mating birds and the incompetence of what seemed to be the entire staff, she wondered that she ever accomplished anything at all.

"I've told you repeatedly," she spoke, agitated, "not to disrupt me during meditation." She closed her eyes again.

"Superior maunt, there… are some guests here that you're going to want to see."

Annoyed, but curious nonetheless, she called for them to be shown in. The door immediately opened and Glinda entered, followed closely by Liir. She was remotely surprised to see Liir again, but remained thoroughly nonplussed as to why his arrival had resulted in the interruption of her afternoon routine. "Welcome," she said, straining very little to be at all welcoming. "Take a seat."

Glinda ignored the suggestion and instead came closer to the maunt. "Liir has something for you to see," she announced. She turned on her heels as though expecting Liir just behind her, but he was still lingering in the doorway. She cast a glare upon him, perhaps a bit more comical than threatening, but he obliged her, approaching for the maunt to better see the bundle in his arms.

"Sweet Oz," the maunt breathed, staring enraptured at the tiny infant that could be no more than a week old, soft green nose and cheeks and cool gray eyes.

She tore her gaze from the child and looked to the maunt that was still standing at the edge of the room, grasping the door handle as if only her presence would hold it in place. "Go fetch Candle," she told her.


	3. Prologue 3

**A/N: **Thanks to Kennedy Leigh Morgan, who, though I haven't spoken to her in forever, helped me write this originally. And also to Veronika Green. She's stuck with me throughout. And betas somewhat.  
Also, maybe it was a little mean of me to put this on hold forever and then, on top of it all, to spend time rewriting it once I came back, but, for real, I couldn't have continued it like it was. So, to all you little minions that aren't reviewing: I see you.

_This is the most exciting thing since… _Glinda racked her memory. Had she done anything exciting _ever?_ She glanced around at Liir and the Superior Maunt, who appeared vaguely tired. _This is the most exciting thing since Nessarose di—_

Candle came through the door and Glinda put a pause on her mental narrative and slid closer to the edge of her seat.

Glinda didn't know for sure how exactly she'd pictured Candle would be, but her mental storyteller hadn't imagined that the normally reserved girl would seem so… well, collected, which is the general impression that she gave, gliding all smooth-like into the room with the domingon slung over her shoulder like a bow. No shame, no avoidance. More confidence, even, than the girl usually showed.

The girl sat obediently in the chair farthest from them all and nearest to the door. The maunt said nothing, seeming to let the silence soak in. Liir was glancing in earnest from the maunt, who was watching the baby out of the corner of her eye, to Candle, who was surveying her fingertips with mild disinterest. Glinda coughed a little.

The Superior Maunt shot Glinda a glance before speaking into the warm stillness. "Candle." Candle flexed her fingers under her gaze. "Is this your child?"

The woman didn't so much as glance at Liir or at the infant on his lap. "Yes."

"May I ask," the maunt began, in a voice that quiet clearly stated that she would ask whatever she pleased with or without permission, "why you left your child?"

Candle decided, then, to look at the maunt, at which point there ensued a silent battle of wills. Liir had turned red along the neck and cheeks. It felt to Glinda like one of the old Shiz debates on the lawn of the Three Queens, but wordless and devoid of aging professors with pince nez on their bulbous noses.

"Baby thought to be dead," Candle answered, at last.

Liir sat forward in his chair, leaning into the conversation and unraveling the silence that had settled around him. He was trembling slightly. "Candle," he fumed, now completely red below the ears. "Don't lie."

Candle looked at him then, her face unresponsive. It was hard to tell if he was shaking from anger or something else.

"Don't you tell me," he said, "that I found this child, my child," he broke off, sighed. "Don't you tell me that you had no time… that you couldn't tell that your own daughter… that the trash… don't you tell me—" He slipped into Qua'ati; Candle looked at him more intensely than before. A part of his reserve broke, his voice rose a pitch. The baby fidgeted in his lap and Candle's face began to shine with anger.

Glinda leaned forward even more, desperate to understand the language that she had never learned. She caught a word that she thought to be "damned." Another "daughter." It all seemed ethereal, somehow, Liir and Candle and the cracking walls of the room all bathed in orange sunlight. Liir's voice a song.

Candle rose from her chair and glared down at Liir, still not acknowledging the baby in his arms. "My child is dead," she said. She turned her back on them all, defiantly, and marched out the door.

The Superior Maunt was the first to break the silence. "What is it that you plan to do, Liir?"

He was still staring at the doorway through which Candle had just left. After a moment, he looked down to his daughter. Looked to Glinda, then to Elphaba's broom in her hands. Looked out the window and stared at the setting sun, the low-hanging clouds. "I can't do this," he said. He rose and crossed the room to where the maunt sat. "Just…" He placed the child in her arms. "I'll come back."

Glinda could have sworn that he paused for just a moment at the door, could have sworn she heard him whisper "Goodbye, Lena." As the door closed faintly behind him, she was certain he whispered, even quieter, "Goodbye, Elphaba."

The uncomfortable silence of the room was broken only by the baby's soft cooing—an attempt to capture the attention of the maunt in whose lap she sat.

Glinda rose halfway from the chair. "I…" The maunt tore her eyes away from the window, through which Liir could be seen, retreating into the sunset. Her whole body was slumped in exhaustion. "Take her."

Glinda unquestioning obeyed, raising the child from the maunt's lap. Feeling, somehow, like some pawn of Time, she followed Liir and Candle's footsteps through the door. She walked aimlessly, concentrating only on making sure that she ran into no one in the halls, lest she have to garner the energy to try to explain the green and the child, or, worse, to politely refuse an explanation.

She glided over to a bench in the courtyard and sat down upon it, laying the girl out on her lap. She hated that already her childhood had been different than other children's, that, while most arrive, loved, into a world of fleece blankets of pink and blue, she had arrived nameless into arguing and neglect and abandonment.

The child suddenly tensed when one of Glinda's teardrops landed softly upon her cheek. "I'm sorry," Glinda gasped, brushing it away. She raised her face to the sky and closed her eyes. She hadn't ever understood, before, the idea of a motherless child. Any girl growing up without muttering "Mama" during a bad dream, without whispering and giggling with her first best friend, the woman who would watch her grow into gowns and marriage. Tears of regret burned her eyes. Tears for not understanding when Elphaba needed most to be understood.

She pulled the baby to her chest and breathed in the soft smell of wood in the night air. She could picture Elphaba in the distance against the strip of the horizon, stumbling listlessly across the marshland of the past. "That won't be you," she whispered, hugging her child closer against the cold of the night.


	4. Chapter 1

**A/N: **I'm sure that you must know how it upsets me to see you not reviewing, little ones, so I doubt that I need to say it again.

**Disclaimer: **Although GregMag left little green high and dry, she is still not mine for the claiming.

* * *

She was having trouble concentrating. Not that she really needed much concentration reading old Ozian plays from the Wizard's reign (so simple, honestly), but not a word of it was getting through to her tonight. The weather was too nice. 

Lena set aside her book and laid back upon the parapet, gazing up at the sky. The sun was setting behind a small hill of clouds that looked like foam on fresh coffee, but with sun poured in. Birds were chirping shrilly.

A slight breeze blew through the trees below and up around her arms. She shivered and turned onto her stomach, hoping to take in some of the warmth from the stone. A small wagon was trudging dutifully toward the mauntery gates, and Lena stared at it for a moment before shivering again and slipping down the stairs.

Maunts shot quick smiles her way as they hurried past her in the hall, late already for their nightly devotions. She smiled back, feeling lost.

She reached a tall pair of wooden doors and raised curled fingers to knock upon it when she heard the tap of footsteps approaching from the other side. She waited, listening. The door handle clicked repeatedly, accompanied with quiet murmurs and sighs of aggravation.

"Mother," Lena said, giggling as she reached for the handle and flicked it open with ease. "Are you ever going to get the doors right?"

Glinda beamed broadly at Lena and pulled her into the doorway in a hug. "The doors hate me," she mumbled into Lena's dark hair.

"Of course they do." She pulled out of the hug. "And so will the guests if you don't go to greet them."

"Oh!" Glinda cried, glancing over her shoulder to the window. "Nighttime already!"

She pulled her skirts close to her body to squeeze past Lena and out into the hallway. "Do wait here, won't you?" she offered, hurrying away without waiting for a response.

"Yes. Of course I will." Lena shut the door, wandered into the room. "No problem. No problem whatsoever." She lit a candle to keep out the darkness. It flickered in and out of view along the walls and floor.

She sighed. She could hardly remember the last time she'd been allowed to see people other than the maunts. It had been even longer since she'd actually been allowed to _meet_ them. She smiled unconsciously to herself and rubbed her hands together lightly. She didn't think she would ever forget her only trip outside the mauntery walls, the buildings high as trees and just as green, people hurrying past, hundreds, thousands, numbers that before had been concepts but which she would now always attribute to masses. More people than she'd ever seen in the mauntery before, staying, coming, going. More than she imagined had ever gone to the mauntery before or would ever go again. So many of them, all dodging past her to their different lives.

She remembered wanting to remove the veil from her window to better see out onto the street. Remembered her mother's strict refusal as she twisted her hands in the skirt in her lap, glancing constantly at the thin carriage wall behind the driver's hunched back. "Not now, Leenie. Later, perhaps."

But there was no later. She'd never gone back to the city again, never really seen anyone new again. Except through the window into the sitting room from the high round tower across the courtyard. And none of those people had the same look, the same petticoats and gleaming gold watches clipped to their shirts. None of them were clouded with hurry, clothed with time.

It seemed almost like a dream now. She was past the habit of sneaking to the tower at night, listening carefully for the closing hymn sounding from the courtyard as she leaned precariously from the tower window toward the far-away gleam of the sitting room, straining to see, straining for more disappointment. She didn't want to be disappointed again.

A noise at the door startled her, and she turned sharply toward it from her ruminations. Someone could be heard struggling roughly with the doorknob and muttering wishes of evil upon it.

Lena laughed aloud and stood to let Glinda in just as the door banged upon and the woman tumbled with it, nearly falling.

"Whoa!" the two cried in unison, Lena rushing to Glinda as Glinda balanced herself with the door handle to which she was still clinging. Glinda straightened, a haughty expression on her face. Lena, feet away from her, laughed. "It's not so hard," she assured her, grabbing her by the hand and leading her into the room. "Just try flicking the latch _before_ you push on the door, yeah?"

"Right," she said, characteristically throwing in a complaint under her breath, some comment on the unnecessary strength of the bedroom doors.

"Mom." Lena giggled, returning to the bed. "The mauntery was built for safety, you know."

Glinda looked up from the shoes that she had been in the midst of unbuckling and raised one eyebrow at her daughter in an I'm-not-as-dumb-as-you-think-I-am look. "I _do_ know my fair share about this mauntery by now, I should hope." Despite the careful smile, the casual movements, Lena could tell that something she'd said had hurt her mother's feelings.

"I… of course you do." Glinda had returned to her shoes. "How were the… uh, the guests?"

"Exhausting," Glinda announced, pulling off her shoes at last and letting them fall to the floor. "About like you."

"Oh, but they're just trying to match your efforts." Lena pulled off her own flats and tossed them against the wall.

"Oh, you." Glinda pushed her into the pillows, where she lay unmoving, gazing at her mother with a calculating look upon her face. "What?" Glinda asked.

"Just making sure that you're okay."

"Fine!" Glinda piped. Lena didn't avert her eyes. "Really," she added, more serious. "I'm just tired, is all." She sighed, as if to prove her point. "And I miss you. And I'm sorry that I'm not here for you as often as I should be."

Lena sat up. "Don't say that. You're here as much as you can be, and I don't expect anything more." She paused. "Or anything less."

Glinda smiled weakly. "I love you."

Lena put on a reassuring smile. "I love you, too. I couldn't ask for anything more."

Glinda smiled even more broadly.

"What?"

"You just… you remind me of her sometimes, is all."

Lena glanced, impulsively, at the door. They were never to speak of the Witch of the West.

Glinda looked there, too, then looked down at the coverlet. "I just miss her," she said quietly. Neither spoke. Glinda attempted to swallow the uneasy silence. " But I have you," she added, brightening. "I could never want anything more."

Lena pulled her into a hug across the small mountain of pillows between them. "You know that I—"

There was a loud knock upon the door, and Lena faltered. "Lady Glinda?" the intruder offered. 


End file.
